U.S. Record Labels are fighting diversity, not piracy

Michael Geist had an interesting post yesterday. In it he discusses research which suggests the real reasons behind the big U.S. record labels attack on internet radio. As usual, it is not about theft, or 'the artists getting paid'. The big US record labels don't care about such things and never have.

The big record labels are dinosaurs fighting to have mammals banned by law. Internet radio offers diversity: according to the research "55 percent of music played on webcasting stations comes from independent artists, a significant variation from the CD and commercial radio market where the major labels control an overwhelming percentage of the market." The big labels care about controlling what you listen to, in the hope of controlling what you buy.

Should such a thing come to Canada it would be even worse, again from the post mentioned above "given that independent labels are responsible for nearly 90 percent of new Canadian music". It should be pointed out that so far Canadian labels have been better than those in the US. Still, for those of you who care about music, I'd urge you to stick to buy Canadian and when and where possible to buy from the band itself - either directly, or through whatever method they recommend on their website. iTunes generally doesn't pay artists very well either. For every 99 cent song you download the artist who recorded it may see as little as 4.5 cents. Recording artists will generally know which method works best for them and will (hopefully) tell you about it on their respective sites.